News

2008 Portora Sermon Jan 08

Sermon at Quatercentenary Celebrations of Royal Schools in Ireland

Sermon preached by the bishop of Clogher, the Rt Revd Dr Michael Jackson,
at a Service held in Portora Royal School to mark the Quatercentenary Celebrations
of Royal Schools in Ireland, on The Feast of the Conversion of St Paul January
25th 2008

Readings from Scripture: Jeremiah 1.4-10; St Matthew 19:27-30

Jeremiah 1.2 Then I said, Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak,
for I am only a boy. But the Lord said to me, Do not say, I am only a boy;
for you shall go to all to whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I
command you…

The crest of Portora Royal School lays on everyone associated with the life
of the School an imperative which is well-known to all gathered here today
for this Service of Thanksgiving and Celebration. We gather as a school community
in the presence of members of the community of Enniskillen who are our friends
and with whom we share and live our heritage. In rejoicing at four hundred
years of Royal Schools in Ireland, our first concern is to record four hundred
years in the life of our own school, Portora, in particular. The imperative
is to hold in honour all people: Omnes honorate. What is both challenging
and disarming about this motto is that it includes every one of us in honouring
others and at the same time does not exclude anyone from among the number
of those whom we, in turn, should hold in honour. We ourselves have to make
the running. The agenda is open and the work of Portorans is never finished.

The word: honour itself has two basic meanings. The first is the repute or
esteem in which a person or thing is held and the second, deriving from this,
is a public honour, official dignity or post which someone holds by virtue
of the repute or esteem in which she or he is held. A further meaning is,
of course, anything which is given as a gift, mark of honour or acknowledgement
of such repute or esteem, whether during life itself or subsequently after
death, in recognition of a life well lived for others. The point which stands
out for us Portorans is that it is from respect for others, however different
from them we might be or they from us, that there flows whatever office or
dignity now or in the future any of us might hold. The same goes for whatever
reward any of us might reap. And our holding of any such office or dignity
or our gaining any such reward is always to be tested against our motto:
Omnes honorate.

In the world of today, the expectation that people might, as a matter of priority,
honour one another probably cuts no ice and sounds like little more than
a recipe for losers. The majority of people nowadays see themselves as having
economic potential, transferable skills and career goals which, given the
correct opportunities and education, they have the capacity to turn into
cash. To talk of honour and of honouring all people sounds quaint and outmoded.
It is exactly the sort of thing it is nice to know other people are doing
because we know well that it is hard work. What is more, deep down, we sense
that it will all too often get in the way of what we have set ourselves to
do and to achieve. I say this because it is often difficult for a generation – and
when I am talking about school life I think of a generation as consisting
not in thirty but in seven years – to appreciate the changes which
have taken place already in our own generation and to begin to assess what
has been lost and what has been gained. With change comes the irreversible
recognition of difference. Difference itself shapes the change and shapes
also the value we place on the past which has preceded it. But difference
and change are complicated concepts. They themselves change our own pace
and force us to accept the pace of others. Often we feel cornered and turn
to insult, subterfuge or politicking. Very quickly, what begins by being
shocking becomes every-day and, somehow, normal. Our generation, like its
immediate predecessor, is completely porous to advertising and its capacity
to manipulate our senses, our values, our relationships, our dissatisfaction
with our lot and our plastic card or that of our parents.

I offer you but one example of what has changed radically in our own time:
information. To all of us, the communications revolution is here to stay
and it is an integral part of our lives. It brings us tremendous advantages,
new intellectual possibilities and consumer conveniences from personal ipod
to genetic mapping. From the perspective of a pupil or a teacher, it is perhaps
one of the most glorious tools of the trade anyone could ever have wished
for, in terms of accessing publicly available information, in presenting
one’s own use of such information and in making it available and attractive
to others. Yet, viewed from a different perspective, it is as dangerous as
it is convenient. I say this because no matter how we try to police it, it
is intrinsically devoid of morality and therefore it can credibly be argued
that, as well as being informative and liberating, it is every bit as much
corrupt and corrupting. Virtual reality carries no responsibilities. Not
only does your appropriation of the net it depend on your perspective. It
also depends on what you want to make it do for you and for other people.
Nothing corrupts like corruption itself!

It is for this reason, therefore, that I want to ask all of you - pupils, staff
and teaching staff alike - to think about content and communication in the
context of your belonging to Portora. Both are relevant to education and
to the tradition which Portorans hold dear. Both also need one another in
the sort of world which I have described, where information, or what the
Americans call infotainment, is seem to hold the key to unlocking every door.
Both content and communication are relevant also to the Scriptures which
are prescribed for today, the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. Our attention
is drawn in the First Reading to the smallness of Jeremiah who sees himself
as no more than a boy in the face of the task before him and to God’s
free and loving gift of communication to him. It is drawn in the Second Reading
to the demand for clarification and further information on the part of Peter,
the companion and fellow-martyr of Paul, when Jesus has just told the disciples
how difficult it is for anyone to presume to enter the Kingdom of God. Again,
I freely admit, these are perspectives which probably seem nonsensical in
the world of today where we have convinced ourselves that we are what we
make ourselves in our most recent makeover. But both, finally, are relevant
to the twin purposes for which Portora was established: religion and learning.
Try as we might, this we cannot escape however modern we might have become.

I myself have had the privilege of being a pupil at Portora, now of being a
Member of its Board of Governors and currently its chairperson. From time
to time, as I sit at Board Meetings in the Seale Room, I recollect vividly
that the last time I sat in that room as a pupil before returning to Portora
in my present capacity was on the last Friday in June 1975 when I was the
only person left in Portora sitting an exam. So much of a ‘left-over’ was
I then that nobody even bothered to invigilate me except the Headmaster’s
Secretary who popped her head sporadically round to door to make sure I knew
how much time I had left for the particular Examination Paper which had me
scratching my head so feverishly. The whole exercise was not assisted by
the fact that demob-happy rowing eights were packing up on the Terrace to
go off to a sun-drenched regatta. But, sad to say, the unseen translation
with which I was grappling had nothing to do with rowing eights or triremes
or even the phaselus, the single-scull shaped like a kidney-bean, immortalized
by the Latin poet Catullus. On a sun-drenched afternoon I was deep in the
fog of guesswork.

Portora taught me a number of things for which I remain grateful to this day.
The first is that you learn best what you teach yourself. By this I do not
mean that you disregard or disrespect your teachers or the syllabus. Untutored
genii are few and far between! But what I do mean is that you remain inquisitive
about what you are taught, that you do not bow down before the finality of
information but recognize its limitations. Information is, after all, no
more than a slip-road to comprehension. Much of it, in any case, is quickly
superseded by new and more exciting discovery and interpretation. Otherwise
we’d be eating stale micro-waved cabbage for lunch for the rest of
our days! The second is never to fear being stuck for something to say. This
may sound trite or twittish but I can guarantee that for every boy here,
as life progresses for you, there will be many opportunities for you to say
something or to shy away from saying anything. My advice is: Don’t
shy away! Too many people assume that tolerance and respect are simply part
of the air we breathe and, therefore, feel that there is no need to do anything
about developing them. This I simply do not accept. The forces of intolerance,
extremism and unthinking conservatism are indeed out there and a potent force
for perversion and distortion in the air we breathe. They have a large following
and are the very mirror-opposite of the instruction: Honour all people which
is laid on Portorans today as yesterday. One never knows how quickly or how
slowly a seed of goodness will blossom and flourish. The third is that education
is never hammered out in the abstract. It never ‘comes out of nowhere’ as
they say. There is always a context from which education emerges and in which
it is delivered. The pupils, mercifully, are largely unaware of this but
education is almost always the shop-window of an ideology. And ideologies
are ephemeral and fickle.

So, it is important for teachers and pupils alike to have a clear grasp of
that seemingly wispy word: ethos. The primary meaning of the word: ethos
is a place where animals or humans regularly and instinctively go, for example
the haunt of animals, as Homer uses it: the haunts and pasturage of horses … (Iliad
6.511). From this physical meaning there develops the human usage of customs
and characteristics, even to the point of facial expression. And again from
this derives the moral dimension of what we refer to as: ethics, the philosophy
of human character and conduct. I have laboured this because place, people
and values all together make up the ethos of a school such as Portora. It
has a glorious location. It has the commitment and dedication of wonderful
people. It stands, like a well-ordered rugby scrum, for the values of respect
and honour of other people. Like Homer’s horses, it has to be somewhere
that boys feel safe and are fed. Like its secondary meaning of human characteristics,
it has to have something to do with the way people are and are shaped and
moulded by the place in terms of character and attitude. Like its philosophical
development in terms of ethics, it has to stand for something of value in
the living out of human behaviour. And this brings me back to my request
that you all, together and individually, continue to explore the word: honour
with which I began. This one word is the legacy of four hundred years of
Portora. It is the value-added for every boy who passes through the Gates,
whatever he subsequently decides to do with it, invest, squander, share or
enhance.

St Paul, whose Conversion we celebrate today, spent all of his Christian theological
life hammering out practical ideas about the relationship between law and
grace. Most of us know what law is but few of us probably know how to define
grace – and yet we are dependent on it every day of our lives. Grace
is an instinct which gives before it stops to calculate return for our investment
of love in others. St Paul, before his conversion, knew more or less everything
about the Law that anyone could know but, in a real sense, the fruit of his
conversion was that he was instructed by God in no uncertain terms to look
for what is good in people whom he formerly despised and whose murders he
orchestrated, Christians and Gentiles. Saul moved from a position of honouring
one tradition at the cost of another to honouring one tradition in the context
of another. In the Ireland of today we all need people who can make this
leap of understanding, who can put it into practice and who can hold the
line when it still remains fashionable to rubbish and dis-honour the tradition
of others, their customs, values and culture – in short their ethos.
Ireland, indeed to be more specific Northern Ireland, will not really improve
significantly until people like you make and sustain the effort to enable
it to improve. Dis-honouring cannot be the way of Portorans. Whatever our
conviction or persuasion, we have to do our utmost to honour all people.
That is what we were founded to do. That is what we are still asked to do
four hundred years later: Omnes honorate.

Acts 9.5 and 6: Tell me, Sir, who are you? The voice answered, I am Jesus whom
you are persecuting. But now get up and go into the city, and you will be
told what you have to do.